In a rapidly evolving field such as computational physics six years is an eternity. Even
though many of the elementary techniques described here are of venerable age their assembly
into sophisticated combined methods and their intensive application to ever new problems is an
ongoing and exciting process. After six years a new the new vistas edition of this textbook
must therefore take into account some of that have opened up recently. Apart from these
additions and some didactic improvements the general struc ture of the book holds good. The
first three chapters are devoted to a thorough if concise treatment of the main ingredients
from numerical mathematics: finite differences linear algebra and stochastics. This exercise
will prove valuable when we proceed in chapters 4 and 5 to combine these elementary tools
into powerful instruments for the integration of differential equations. The final chapters are
devoted to a number of applications in selected fields: statistical physics quantum mechanics
and hydrodynamics. I will gradually augment this text by web-resident sample programs. These
will be written in JAVA and will be accompanied by short explanations and references to this
text. Thus it may prove worthwhile to pay an occasional visit to my web-site
www.ap.univie.ac.at users Franz.Vesely to see if any new applets have sprung up.
